that he will not reveal the secret that year.  But of an incident so triumphant in the annals of the gastric art, our philosopher would not deprive posterity of the knowledge.  The animal had been bled to death by a wound under the shoulder, whence, after a copious effusion, the master-cook extracted the entrails, washed them with wine, and hanging the animal by the feet, he crammed down the throat the stuffings already prepared.  Then covering the half of the pig with a paste of barley, thickened with wine and oil, he put it in a small oven, or on a heated table of brass, where it was gently roasted with all due care:  when the skin was browned, he boiled the other side; and then, taking away the barley paste, the pig was served up, at once boiled and roasted.  These cooks, with a vegetable, could counterfeit the shape and the taste of fish and flesh.  The king of Bithynia, in some expedition against the Scythians, in the winter, and at a great distance from the sea, had a violent longing for a small fish called aphy—­a pilchard, a herring, or an anchovy.  His cook cut a turnip to the perfect imitation of its shape; then fried in oil, salted, and well powdered with the grains of a dozen black poppies, his majesty’s taste was so exquisitely deceived, that he praised the root to his guests as an excellent fish.  This transmutation of vegetables into meat or fish is a province of the culinary art which we appear to have lost; yet these are cibi innocentes, compared with the things themselves.  No people are such gorgers of mere animal food as our own; the art of preparing vegetables, pulse, and roots, is scarcely known in this country.  This cheaper and healthful food should be introduced among the common people, who neglect them from not knowing how to dress them.  The peasant, for want of this skill, treads under foot the best meat in the world; and sometimes the best way of dressing it is least costly.

The gastric art must have reached to its last perfection, when we find that it had its history; and that they knew how to ascertain the aera of a dish with a sort of chronological exactness.  The philosophers of Athenaeus at table dissert on every dish, and tell us of one called maati, that there was a treatise composed on it; that it was first introduced at Athens, at the epocha of the Macedonian empire, but that it was undoubtedly a Thessalian invention; the most sumptuous people of all the Greeks.  The maati was a term at length applied to any dainty of excessive delicacy, always served the last.

But as no art has ever attained perfection without numerous admirers, and as it is the public which only can make such exquisite cooks, our curiosity may be excited to inquire whether the patrons of the gastric art were as great enthusiasts as its professors.